AMD FX 8370 & FX 8370E

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The crew at Overclockers Club took AMD's FX 8370 and the FX 8370E processors around the block a few times to see how they performed.

Both chips eagerly approached the 5GHz realm to compete on an almost level field with the pricier FX-9590 and FX 9370. First up was the FX-8370E, a chip I felt was going to be the weak link, but turned out to run at 4.99GHz with 1.5v applied in the BIOS while running the memory at over 2400MHz and hyperlink speeds above 2600MHz.
 
In the gaming benchmarks, there is not a hell of a lot of separation between the 8370E and a 4770K in Metro: Last Light. Is this because of the title being more GPU-bound, the code being more multi-thread capable, or some combination of the two?

There was a lot more separation on the Batman: Arkham Origins benchmark results, but still nothing that made it seem unplayable.

I am tempted to snag one of these the next time I am at MicroCenter to go in an AM3+ build that hasn't been used in quite a while. It might breathe some life into what would otherwise continue to be a dust-collecting relic sitting on a shelf that my wife always complains is too cluttered with computer stuff...
 
It varies, I want to say something like 80% - 90% of games aren't CPU bound, so you won't see much of a difference at all between a budget AMD CPU and a high-end i7. RTS's, games that use a lot of physics, and some newer titles (Wolfenstein and Watch Dogs) tend to show more of a spread. This might increase in the future as the newer consoles will likely receive more optimization for multiple cores, which could trickle down to the PC.
 
It varies, I want to say something like 80% - 90% of games aren't CPU bound, so you won't see much of a difference at all between a budget AMD CPU and a high-end i7. RTS's, games that use a lot of physics, and some newer titles (Wolfenstein and Watch Dogs) tend to show more of a spread. This might increase in the future as the newer consoles will likely receive more optimization for multiple cores, which could trickle down to the PC.

Some MMOs are pretty CPU intensive. When Star Wars the Old Republic Launched it was CPU-bound on most systems. I actually had to upgrade from a Core 2 Quad Q6600 to a i5 2500K to play the game reasonably. I believe this also follows for newer MMOs but since almost all of them are just clones of WoW I don't have any experience with them.
 
i actually one the 8370E to replace my 1090T but... i'm worried about my motherboard. It really doesn't look like a bad cpu i think..
 
Crap article.. why compare these $200 CPUs against $300 to $1000 Intels?? At least in Josh's PCPer article, he compared these "new" AMD processors to an Intel architecture of similar age.. Ivy Bridge.. and the 3770K was faster than these "new" CPUs plus faster than the FX-8350 AND FX-9590!!

Not sure about AMD anymore.. use to love them last century and most of the first decade of this century.. but I can't buy their CPUs anymore. After hearing the MaximumPC podcast about how Origin is now using AMD GPUs again where the AMD guys admitted they dropped the ball for a long time on with systems intergrators, AMD not updating their chipsets in years, and releasing "new" products with 2 year old architecture that had Josh writing..

the “new” lineup is a tougher pill to swallow. Yes, it is nice to have a refreshed product line. Yes, it is nice to have the other 8 core offerings at a lower price. It is not so nice that the FX-8370 is not significantly faster than the older FX-8350 all the while costing an extra $20. It is not nice that the FX-8370e, though branded with the same model number, is in fact significantly slower than the FX-8370 and (at least with my sample) does not pull all that much less power from the wall socket. I like the initiative that AMD had in attempting to make a more power efficient 8 core model that approached the performance of the higher TDP parts, but it does not simply seem enough of a savings to justify it costing the same as the standard FX-8370 (much less the cheaper FX-8350).

.. my confidence in AMD's future is shaky at best.
 
Why are AMD still stuck on Piledriver? I thought steamroller was their next revision.
 
Going from 32nm SIO to 28nm bulk silicon did not allow for more performance @ >4.X GHz.

AMD stopped pouring money into AM3+ because of the market not being as good for them as it is with FM2+, this is why were only seeing piledriver on AM3+.

Next stop 2016 for a new "cpu" from AMD.
 
Some MMOs are pretty CPU intensive. When Star Wars the Old Republic Launched it was CPU-bound on most systems. I actually had to upgrade from a Core 2 Quad Q6600 to a i5 2500K to play the game reasonably. I believe this also follows for newer MMOs but since almost all of them are just clones of WoW I don't have any experience with them.

Biggest knock against that review is they only tested 2 games, pretty small sample of games. Should be using more wider section, but that is true there are plenty of games that are more cpu limited then ones they picked.
 
It varies, I want to say something like 80% - 90% of games aren't CPU bound, so you won't see much of a difference at all between a budget AMD CPU and a high-end i7. RTS's, games that use a lot of physics, and some newer titles (Wolfenstein and Watch Dogs) tend to show more of a spread. This might increase in the future as the newer consoles will likely receive more optimization for multiple cores, which could trickle down to the PC.

I wonder what DX12 will do. On the surface it should make AMD CPU's (or say, Intel Pentium's and dual cores)even more competitive as it emphasizes helping weaker CPU's, that's pretty much it's whole purpose. So that 80-90% you mention could become 95%.

But then I wonder if down the road games will just start using the new DX12 CPU headroom to do more things, returning the balance to it's current ratio of CPU limited, so we could eventually end up back where we started, unless my thinking is just wrong and this will be a permanent change.
 
Crap article.. why compare these $200 CPUs against $300 to $1000 Intels?? At least in Josh's PCPer article, he compared these "new" AMD processors to an Intel architecture of similar age.. Ivy Bridge.. and the 3770K was faster than these "new" CPUs plus faster than the FX-8350 AND FX-9590!!

Not sure about AMD anymore.. use to love them last century and most of the first decade of this century.. but I can't buy their CPUs anymore. After hearing the MaximumPC podcast about how Origin is now using AMD GPUs again where the AMD guys admitted they dropped the ball for a long time on with systems intergrators, AMD not updating their chipsets in years, and releasing "new" products with 2 year old architecture that had Josh writing..
.. my confidence in AMD's future is shaky at best.

Umm, 3770k was still way more expensive than 8370 even back in the day...

I dont agree they should benchmark against Intel architecture's "of a similar age" though, that's just stupid. what matters is what's available now.

Reviews for 8370 have just highlighted how bad reviews are, in many different ways. Now that Anand's gone, hate to say it but Ian Cutress's reviews are just annoying and confusing. Several of the big sites only reviewed the 8370e so far, which is annoying as it's the lesser performer. Some of the sites just produce darn near unreadable graphs, that make me want to throw something at the editors. Like what idiot thinks graphs in 20 slightly different shades of blue is a good idea. It boggles the mind. Overclockers club graphs are also very difficult to read. Another fun thing is how many sites bounce around among different processors per benchmark (for example, one benchmark may include 5 different CPU's, the next 11, the next down to say, 4, for no apparent reason). Making it impossible to compare two CPU's across all the benchmarks. Yet another annoying thing is sites that restrict themselves to only 3-4 AMD processors and leave Intel out entirely. Yet another is how most sites use Intel i7's against the 8370, I swear this is just to make AMD look bad, as they're simply another class of CPU and well more expensive as well. Heck, many of the sites use the $1000 5960X or whatever it's called against the 8370...again what purpose does this serve but making AMD look bad in a benchmark?

Now, I actually cant entirely complain about the i7's, 5960 etc, TOO much, because more data is sometimes nice to have rather than less, so at least there's an argument for it, although again it's often misleading pitting $330+ Intel CPU's against the $199 8370 or $179 8350. Another thing is how sites often compare power usage ONLY against the low end Intel's, making the FX's look bad, when another poster here showed how the Intel 5000 series etc use huge amounts of power often more than even the 220 watt FX's people are always bashing. It was an eye opener.

Look, everybody knows Intel is better at the high end than AMD right now. Dont take my previous complaints otherwise, but some sites seem out to make it seem worse than it even is.

And the unreadable graphs and crappy reviews are there own separate complaint. I really cant find a 8370 review I'm happy with. Waiting for Tom's or Xbit Labs or Hardware Canucks as the last hopes. Those guys do good, ACTUALLY LEGIBLE, reviews usually.
 
These chips fill a niche market as all bulldozer arch chips have. I suspect the reason that they didn't implement steamroller in AM3 is just that the development costs would have exceeded the expected revenue. The value proposition of these chips is simply more physical (integer) cores for less money than at intel. The reviews are all fine and they all show that AMD has a dated architecture based on flawed logic.
 
I really hate that they never do these reviews based on actual real world use. I would love to just once see a review where they did their tests with 1 or 2 VM's running, a browser with 30 or so tabs open, a BR rip playing on another screen, and the computer running FDE.
 
I really hate that they never do these reviews based on actual real world use. I would love to just once see a review where they did their tests with 1 or 2 VM's running, a browser with 30 or so tabs open, a BR rip playing on another screen, and the computer running FDE.

Or hosting 500 instances of apache. Web servers love these chip :)
 
My 8350 reaches 5ghz stable on a H100 cooler, Crosshair IV motherboard and 1866 8gb Ripjaws CL9.

I find that my CPU gets really hot past 5ghz so I've left it at that. But the 8370E has a much lower power output, which means lower temps.

So does that mean in theory, the 8370E could reach 5.5-6ghz if cooled and tweaked properly?

:confused:
 
I'd imagine the 8370E gets its lower TDP from the fact that it has a 3.3 base clock instead of 4.0, with lower stock voltage to go with it. The tom's review of it said they had to crank voltage up to 1.5V to get it to even boot into windows @ 5.0GHz, so good luck with 5.5 much less 6.
 
real overclocker website (not Tom) http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?289570-AMD-FX-8370E-and-OC-fun-witl-allinone-AMD

Flanker did some toying around with the setup there is another topic from Dave also testing the FX8370 .

Flanker got validation at 5.8GHZ but that is all there is. Not sure where the sweet spot lies it does vary for different chips. More then likely it is lower then 5.5ghz

Some folks on here (Johan or Eagle) got one of the other (older) chips to 6GHZ, but it is not an easy job.
 
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